Mark Slouka's novel begins with the child of Czech immigrants to the US, now living in New York, who has been brought up on the folklore of his parents' homeland. As he grows up he becomes aware that he has never been told what his parents did during the Nazi occupation of Prague. As an adult he makes a journey back to Czechoslovakia and it is only then that he discovers their part in the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the notorious 'butcher of Prague' and begins to understand his mother Ivana's unhappiness. Intertwined with this gripping history is a passionate love story, the tragic consequences of which transcend both years and continents.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka's parents survived the Nazis only to be forced to then escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into. From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial, admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit and the lies we tell-in an attempt to reach his mother, the figure at the center of the labyrinth. Her story-the revelation of her life-long burden and the forty-year love affair that might have saved her-shows the way out of the maze.
In eleven beautifully wrought stories-ranging from occupied Czechoslovakia to California's Central Valley to the rainforests of the Pacific Northwest-Mark Slouka explores moments in life when our backs are to the wall. Whether battling the end of desire, the fact of injustice, or death itself, the men and women in these stories are willing to use whatever comes to hand-luck, accident, desperate gesture-to emerge victorious.
In "Crossing," a father hoping to compensate for his failures finds himself facing his past while fording a river with his young son on his back; in "Conception," a young couple frozen by the possible end of their marriage is offered an unexpected way back; in "Half- Life," a proud, aging shut-in finds her resolve tested by an extraordinary visitor determined to shatter her solitude. Alternately harrowing and redemptive, these are stories of ordinary men and women, doing everything possible to tighten their grip on life.
